Brocade's Chairman on the Future of Engineering, Communications

"When I started my degree, circuit design was the place you began," said House. "Today at Michigan Tech, my alma mater, digital signal processing is the first engineering class. It's almost like discrete components have gone away."

Working at higher levels of abstraction is the corollary of technical advancement, House said. "If you looked under the car I drove in college and the car I drive today or the computer or the radio or TV, you can see how everything is more complex, and to deal with that complexity we need abstraction."

Social networking has had its impact on engineering, too. "The web certainly replaced the Wagon Wheel -- the bar where early Silicon Valley folks hung out back in the Fairchild days. Everybody used to get together there and talk. Their napkins were even printed with a form to fill out your business plan.

"Intellectual property and trade secrets weren't as carefully defined then, and the info flew over alcohol. I think it still happens now -- it's hard to control."

Switching gears, I asked House what he saw as the big issues in communications today.

"Virtualization at the server level really put the spotlight on the network," he said. "The whole abstraction of resources from physical to virtual entities is providing yet another level of abstraction so we can operate more flexibly."

Dave House's former bosses (from left) Andy Grove, Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore back in the pre-PC days of chip design.

I wrote recently about standards efforts to drive new ultra low latencies into Ethernet that will have these folks nipping at FC's heels in the future. Two Broadcom engineers are among the leaders of the efforts.

Rick - at Space Codesign, we have an ESL EDA tool for hardware/software co-design of SoC embedded systems. It's a Montreal-based university tech transfer startup and our key technology allows you to use the same C/C++/SystemC model and retarget it for either hardware or software implementation - without recoding. It's targeted at system architects but also enables software designers and hardware engineers to work with them as a team.

On the tussle between Ethernet and Fibre Channel, both technologies have a strong role to play in storage networking. Fibre channel continues to find adoption and loyalty among customers who value the six 9's of uptime fibre channel can uniquely deliver for the most mission critical applications and data. It is perhaps one of the stickiest technologies I have seen in my career because of its unmatched reliability and deterministic performance. Ethernet is ideal for IP-based storage. The industry has recognized the need for purpose-built Ethernet technology, such as Ethernet fabrics, for the data center and in support of newer technologies like scale-out NAS and distributed file systems that have become popular with applications such as Big Data analytics.

I was just remarking on this last week. When I last worked in an engineering department (before going F/T writer/editor), there were two distinct teams: HW and SW. And a fair amount of suspicion between the two as to which group did more work...